Bear in a Window: Australian children's perspectives on lockdown and experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic

This paper examines the reflections of a cohort of Australian children who lived through the 2020–21 COVID-19 pandemic and experienced being in ‘lockdown’; a state of largely being confined to the home for long periods daily. We report how children reflect on their experiences and illustrate how reflections draw on similar topics focused on localised child concerns regarding health, education, family, digital engagement, mealtimes and food. Further, we argue for the importance of including children's own voices of lived experience in reports regarding life during the pandemic since these perspectives may differ from those reported by adults on children's behalf.     

Disruptions,adjustments and hopes: The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on child well-being in five Majority World Countries

Drawing on integrated data from focus groups and diary entries, we explored the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on child well-being for children from five Majority World Countries. We focus on the disruptions the pandemic caused, the adjustments made in response to these, and children's vision of a post-pandemic world. Underlying children's experiences of loss, boredom and concerns about educational progress, was an awareness of systemic inequalities that disadvantaged them or others in their community. Findings have implications on capturing children's voices through introspective and dialogical approaches that transcend cultures and for the development of preventive and responsive interventions during crises.     

The use of digital media: To support and enhance vulnerable children’s perspectives,voices and choices

The article reports findings from a study that explored the potential of digital media to create new possibilities for professional caregivers to encounter 10 vulnerable children (7–17 years old) as subjects (rather than objects) and participants in their own lives. Five professionals received training in media pedagogy and experimented with new ways to communicate with children. Digital communication was found to expand the children's ability to engage in dialogue. Professionals need to find the courage to engage in digital communication on a child's terms as it helps generate a relationship that offers children new opportunities for raising their voices.     

Making Sense of Multi‐Actor Dialogues in Family Therapy and Network Meetings

In recent years, a number of family therapists have conceptualized psychotherapy as a dialogical activity. This view presents family therapy researchers with specific challenges, the most important of which is to find ways of dealing with the dialogical qualities of the multi‐actor dialogues that occur, for example, in family therapeutic conversations. In this article, we propose some preliminary ideas concerning qualitative investigations of multi‐actor dialogues. Our aim is to work toward an integration of Bakhtin’s theoretical concepts with good practices in qualitative research (e.g., dialogical tools and concepts of a narrative processes coding system) in order to make sense of family therapy dialogues. A specific method that we have called Dialogical Methods for Investigations of Happening of Change is described. This method allows for a general categorization of the qualities of responsive dialogues in a single session, and also for a detailed focus on particular sequences through a microanalysis of specific topical episodes. The particular focus is on the voices present in the utterances, the positioning of each speaker, and the addressees of the utterances. The method is illustrated via an analysis of a couple therapy session with a depressed woman and her husband.     

Associations Between Social Anxiety and Nonverbal Processing Skill in Preadolescent Boys and Girls

This study was designed to investigate the potential association between social anxiety and children's ability to decode nonverbal emotional cues. Participants were 62 children between 8 and 10 years of age, who completed self-report measures of social anxiety, depressive symptomatology, and nonspecific anxious symptomatology, as well as nonverbal decoding tasks assessing accuracy at identifying emotion in facial expressions and vocal tones. Data were analyzed with multiple regression analyses controlling for generalized cognitive ability, and nonspecific anxious and depressive symptomatology. Results provided partial support for the hypothesis that social anxiety would relate to nonverbal decoding accuracy. Difficulty identifying emotions conveyed in children's and adults' voices was associated with general social avoidance and distress. At higher levels of social anxiety, children more frequently mislabeled fearful voices as sad. Possible explanations for the obtained results are explored.     

Understanding the meanings of children: a reflexive process

This paper identifies a number of children's voices within qualitative academic writing. It suggests that researchers can discover a variety of children's voices by employing reflexive techniques to ensure that their interpretations are not influenced by their personal prejudice, or the ethics, tools, roles and theories of their professional paradigm. It concludes that those who work with children may be able to reinforce the theme of the UN Convention on Rights of the Child by employing this reflexive approach to enable them to attribute equal status to the views of all the children whom they encounter.     

Small Voices: Children's Rights and Representation in Social Work Research

The persons who are social work's constituencies are typically disenfranchised and excluded. This is particularly the case with children whose voices are routinely suppressed. This paper outlines why Children's Article 12 Rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to express their views on all matters concerning them should also apply to social work research. The ethical issues around research with children are explored and a number of different research methods are outlined in order to offer a starting point for social workers wishing to place children's viewpoints and voices at the centre of their research.     

Impact of Covid-19 pandemic on the transnationalization of LGBT* activism in Japan and beyond

The global Covid-19 pandemic has strongly impacted social practices, relocating communications and social networks into the digital space. Contextualized in such impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the local LGBT* activism in Japan achieved a special momentum: both the acceleration of the socio-spatial relocation of LGBT* activism to the digital space and the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics 2020 by 1 year enabled activists to mobilize people domestically and globally. The pandemic was not the actual cause or driver of the local LGBT* activism, yet it has been an important catalyst for the transnationalization of the local movement in Japan, pushing evidently the spatial boundaries to achieve broader public outreach but in turn also receiving stronger support from the global community through transnational networks. This study explores novel dynamics of spatiality and temporality of social transformations through the Covid-19-induced increase in global digital connectedness as well as transnationalization of local actions.     

Effects of Conditioning Voices as Reinforcers for Listener Responses on Rate of Learning,Awareness, and Preferences for Listening to Stories in Preschoolers With Autism

We used a delayed non-concurrent pre- and post-intervention probe design to test the effects of a voice conditioning protocol (VCP) with 3 preschoolers with autism on (a) rate of acquisition of listener curricular objectives, (b) observing voices and the presence of adults across 3 settings, (c) selecting to listen to adults tell stories in free play setting, and (d) the occurrence of stereotypy in the story setting. The VCP conditioned voices as reinforcers for listening to recordings of voices via stimulus-stimulus pairing, which resulted in the children listening to audio recordings of voices in 90% of intervals in 5-min concurrent-operant preference tests. After voices became conditioned reinforcers, all 3 children's learning accelerated; 2 children's observing responses increased in the 3 settings; and 2 children selected to listen to stories and also showed decreased stereotypy in the story setting. The data suggest that conditioned reinforcement for observing responses may be a verbal behavior developmental cusp that acts to accelerate learning that involves listening, and that the cusp may be induced using the VCP.     

Caught in the Cross Fire: Children’s Right to Education During Conflict — The Case of Nepal 1996–2006

The article focuses on the impact on children, schools and education during the 10 year conflict in Nepal and raises questions for further research on schooling in the post‐conflict era. The article is based on research undertaken as part of a British Council funded Higher Education Link. Focus group discussions and interviews were conducted with school children, parents, teachers and community leaders between 2004 and 2006 and draws on informal discussions and observations with NGOs and teachers in the post‐conflict period, including NGOs visual methods to enable children’s voices to be heard in the peace process.     

Pandemic in the Time of Trump: Digital Media Logic and Deadly Politics

This paper examines the power of a mediatized President to use reflexive propaganda—the rules and assumptions of digital media—to define a public health crisis. During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, President Trump engaged in attention-based politics, or the use of media to draw attention of the largest audience to himself, at the expense of an efficient response to a major public health crisis. The repetitive tweets, with a common form—vulgar and combative language, usually against journalists—converted Donald Trump into a digital meme and enabled the President to dwell on his distorted accomplishments and TV ratings, to downplay health risks, and initially define the lethal virus as a benign hoax.     

Disability,personalisation and community arts: exploring the spatial dynamics of children with disabilities participating in inclusive music classes*

This paper uses personalisation and the capabilities approach to explore inclusive music classes for children with disabilities in Scotland. It provides a unique insight into the impact of participation through the voices of the disabled young musicians, their parents and tutors. The study highlights the power of inclusive spaces to transform lives, to build confidence and contest disabled identities. It engages in the spatial dynamic of opening up inclusive spaces, as well as exposing emerging tensions in the liminal space that is created through movement between safe and supported spaces and the antithesis, spaces that disempower and marginalise. The findings suggest good practice around personalisation, when conceived of from a social justice perspective, as a template for working with other marginalised groups and in other professional settings.     

Platform vulnerabilities: harassment and misogynoir in the digital attack on Leslie Jones

ABSTRACT

In the summer of 2016, racist, misogynistic harassers attacked comedienne Leslie Jones on Twitter and on her personal website, which they hacked and flooded with sexist and racist imagery stolen largely from her personal accounts. Through a multiplatform discourse analysis of the Leslie Jones attack, this paper examines the connections between platform vulnerabilities and the vulnerabilities of women of color, as well as the links between the rise of the alt-right and an increase in explicitly racist, misogynistic behaviors. Three key themes emerged from the analysis: messages of support and affirmation; the need for intervention; and the connection between this incident, systemic racism and sexism, and the rise of the alt-right. These themes serve as a bridge between the vulnerabilities of platforms and of women of color in those digital spaces and beyond. The supportive awareness campaigns and calls to action that issue publics launched online attempted to discursively ‘patch’ two perceived vulnerabilities – of Twitter as a platform and of Jones herself. However, in response to these ‘patches,’ members of the alt-right condemned Twitter and mainstream media for marginalizing their conservative voices, using this discourse to bolster their performance of victimization and oppression. Overall, this case study provides insight into the dynamics at work in the rise of the alt-right and online harassment, with particular attention to the significance of digital media, celebrity, and popular feminism in the ongoing political shifts in the United States.     

A Measure of the Ability to Identify Emotion in Children's Tone of Voice

This paper introduces a test of the ability to decode emotion of varying intensity in the voices of children. Construction of the measure, the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy Child Paralanguage (DANVA2-CP), is described. An initial study using elementary-school-aged children found that accuracy scores increased with age, were internally consistent, and were correlated, as expected, with indices of personality and social competence. Data from 20 additional studies, using participants from across the age range, provided further evidence of construct validity for the DANVA2-CP. Based on the results, it was concluded that the DANVA2-CP may be an appropriate measure of the ability to identify emotion in children's paralinguistic presentations.     

News and information leadership in the digital age

This paper examines information networks on social media to draw conclusions about influence relationships among members of the mass media. The project considers social networks and information patterns using Twitter data, first at the newspaper level and second at the journalist level. Using a computational approach, we look for evidence of elite-directed information flows, as well as exploring whether we find evidence of an increase in the democratization of newsmaking. This study finds that elite voices continue to dominate information networks in the digital age; however, it also finds evidence that information can move expeditiously from journalists in local and regional outlets to elite ones, and vice versa. We move further to explore the content of tweets among the journalist network, finding that there are substantial, direct interactions among elite and regional and local journalists. Our results taken together uncover new network patterns and provide a novel insight on the role of information technologies in newsmaking in the digital age.     

Adolescent and family development: Autonomy and identity in the digital age

Adolescence is a time when youth are faced with multiple tasks that intersect and influence one another, e.g., increased desire for autonomy, salience of identity issues, peer orientation, self-focus and self-consciousness, and a continuing need for a safe environment in which to explore autonomy and identity. These all occur in a dynamic ecosystemic environment, which in the past would have mostly included family, peers, and school, but today also includes cyberspace as both a system, and a means to interact with many other systems through the use of multiple forms of information technology (IT). This paper uses the voices and experiences of 128 adolescents, captured in qualitative interviews, to look at autonomy and identity in the digital age as they talk about their parents vis à vis their use of IT. Thematic analysis revealed two major themes: 1) Adolescents spoke of their expertise. In particular they commented on their knowledge to repair equipment, ability to use IT well, their sense of pride in their own ability and their parents' acknowledgement of this ability. 2) Subjects perceived little need for their own supervision, but assessed that other adolescents and younger children needed to be watched closely by their parents. Implications of this work are discussed.     

Resolving the (Apparent) Talker Recognition Paradox in Developmental Speech Perception

The infant literature suggests that humans enter the world with impressive built‐in talker processing abilities. For example, newborns prefer the sound of their mother's voice over the sound of another woman's voice, and well before their first birthday, infants tune in to language‐specific speech cues for distinguishing between unfamiliar talkers. The early childhood literature, however, suggests that preschoolers are unable to learn to identify the voices of two unfamiliar talkers unless these voices are highly distinct from one another, and that adult‐level talker recognition does not emerge until children near adolescence. How can we reconcile these apparently paradoxical messages conveyed by the infant and early childhood literatures? Here, we address this question by testing 16.5‐month‐old infants (N = 80) in three talker recognition experiments. Our results demonstrate that infants at this age have difficulty recognizing unfamiliar talkers, suggesting that talker recognition (associating voices with people) is mastered later in life than talker discrimination (telling voices apart). We conclude that methodological differences across the infant and early childhood literatures—rather than a true developmental discontinuity—account for the performance differences in talker processing between these two age groups. Related findings in other areas of developmental psychology are discussed.     

Free time,gender and the pandemic: An exploration of children's daily routines in the times of COVID-19 in Chile

This article discusses the differentiation by gender displayed by children between 8 and 12 years old on how they used their free time during the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile. This study had a qualitative approach, where 43 in-depth interviews were conducted with children from three different regions of the country, using participatory photo-elicitation as the central tool. The main results of the study show a configuration of free time based on gender stereotypes, showing that boys are the ones who most adhere to such stereotypes, triggering a crisis in the identity construction of masculinities during childhood. The study also suggests that socioeconomic and territorial differences between children configures different experiences of the use of free time.     

Parenthood and dynamics of life satisfaction in times of COVID-19

We analyze data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, including a pre-pandemic baseline and seven survey waves between May 2020 and September 2021. Fixed effects panel regression models are run over more than 11,000 individuals, distinguishing among women and men with young children (<5 years), older children (5–15 years), or no children in the household. We hypothesize that declines in life satisfaction during the first lockdown are sharper among parents, whose domestic demands increase, than among the childless. We develop competing hypotheses that parents might be resilient and have higher life satisfaction during the later phases of the pandemic (Adaptation Hypothesis) or that the pandemic stressors accumulate, leading to even lower satisfaction over time (Accumulation Hypothesis). The results only support the Accumulation Hypothesis among mothers. Whereas mothers fared comparatively well during the first lockdown, further pandemic stressors have seemingly exhausted their resilience, leading to stronger declines during the winter 2020/2021 lockdown. Among men with older children and without children, life satisfaction decreased during the first and subsequent lockdowns. Men with young children were the only group with almost unchanged life satisfaction throughout the pandemic.     

Is Death Taboo for Children? Developing Death Ambivalence as a Theoretical Framework to Understand Children’s Relationship with Death,Dying and Bereavement

Children’s voices are missing from debates related to the idea that death is a taboo subject and this limits understandings of how children encounter death. Drawing on data from focus groups with children aged 9–12, this paper aimed to explore if and how children experience death as a taboo, but discovered that the death‐taboo thesis lacks nuance, confining and misrepresenting children’s experiences. Death ambivalence is thus proposed as a conceptual tool to illuminate children’s relationship with death. It identifies policy and practice implications concerned with developing death literacy and brings a new theorisation to death and childhood studies.